Macworld has posted a new review of the Mac version of Dragon Age: Origins Collector's Edition. Bioware's latest fantasy role playing epic challenges players to take on the role of a Grey Warden and defend the land of Fereldin from the monstrous Darkspawn. Macworld gave the game a score of 5 out of 5.

From the review:

On my MacBook Pro 2.66GHz running Mac OS 10.6, Dragon Age was stunning. From the fire effects of enemy spells to the gush of blood from a blade, the details were beautiful and realistic. Unlike some RPGs, there isn’t a major drop off between cut scenes and combat; the shadows and shading were impressive in both. There are some moments of slow-down, particularly in the bigger environments, but on the whole I was impressed with my machine’s ability to handle this high-end game.

While chaotic, battles are easy to manage thanks to the pause button and the ability to instantly order your party to change tactics.Combat isn’t just about throwing the same spells and swords at your enemies and hoping they win. Strategy is paramount. The combat system provides a potent set of tools for your battle plans, drawing from Bioware’s Knights of the Old Republic and Baldur’s Gate series. Instead of turn-based combat, you can control your party members in real time and pause the game to give individual orders or modify a player’s tactics thanks to a handy “tactics” tab. For example, I played as a mage with some potent healing spells, so I set his tactics tab to heal his allies when they had less than fifty percent health. Meanwhile, I deployed my tank to draw enemies to him by activating an ability. I had my rogue set in a preset “scrapper” arrangement and I personally controlled our witch, Morrigan, because I like to micro-manage her crowd control spells.

You only can have four players in your party at any one time and one of them must be your character. On your first playthrough, one of your major frustrations may be encountering an NPC who wants to join your party but your own character has significant overlap with their abilities. You don’t want to have three mages in your party, so I found it hard to turn away the healer Wynne’s abilities or Sten’s warrior strengths or Leliana’s uh, singing? Actually, Leliana and her strange Eastern European-accented-battle-nun-weirdness were replaced early on by the elven rogue Zevran.